Making Schools Safe for Criminals

Feelings can overwhelm people brutalized by
tragedies like the Columbine High School murders. Grief, hatred, fear and shock
shake their foundations. Reason is buried under an avalanche of strong emotion,
and the ancient urge to kill the bearer of bad news surfaces with a vengeance.
In modern times this takes the form of impassioned, emotional pleas for firearms
prohibitions. Even before the bodies were removed from the school, Denver
newspapers received articles using the massacre as a news hook to call for gun
prohibitions.

Emotion, not reason, prompts the calls for
stricter gun control laws. Britain has some of the most onerous gun control laws
in the world. They did not prevent the Dunblane massacre. New York has some of
the most anti-gun regulations in the United States. They did not prevent the
Long Island Railroad massacre. Canadian's severe gun laws did not stop the mass
murder of female students at the Ecole Polytechnique university in Montreal.
Colorado has laws against murder, assault, exploding bombs in public places and
destroying school property. The laws did not prevent these two young men from
murdering, setting off over 30 bombs, or destroying Columbine High School.

What Colorado's law did do was disarm
law-abiding citizens and leave them at the mercy of two gun-toting predators. By
all accounts, the shooters knew that they had superior force. They reveled in
the power that it gave them. For two hours, they roamed the school killing
unarmed victims at will. Compare this with the outcome when three terrorists
attempted to machine-gun a crowd in Jerusalem in 1984. Handgun-carrying Israelis
immediately downed the terrorists, and only one innocent person died. The
surviving terrorist said that his group had planned to make their escape before
police could respond. They had not realized that Israeli citizens were armed.

In the United States, two students were murdered
in an October 1997 shooting spree at a high school in Pearl, Miss. Deaths were
limited because an assistant principal went to his car, got his gun and shot the
shooter. In Edinboro, Pa., a teacher was murdered. When the shooter stopped to
reload, a bystander pointed a shotgun at him, preventing additional deaths.
John R. Lott and William Landes examined these and other cases of mass
public shootings in the United States. They found that from 1977 to 1995, deaths
from mass public shootings declined by 90 percent, and injuries by 82 percent,
in states that passed concealed handgun laws.

Does "easy access" to guns contribute to
massacres like the one at Columbine? Across countries, there is no predictable
relationship between gun ownership, or "access," and murder rates. The Swiss,
New Zealanders and Finns all own guns at very high rates. All three countries
have lower murder rates. Finland and Sweden have similar murder rates despite
big differences in gun ownership. If easy access truly does contribute to the
frequency of massacres, one would expect to have seen more mass murders in the
1950s. At that time any Colorado 14-year-old could buy a gun with no questions
asked. Such "easy access" is now unthinkable. Massacres, like those at Chuck E
Cheese and Columbine, are not.

The best available data show that shall-issue
concealed-carry laws reduce the number of murders by giving law-abiding citizens
the power to resist. Absent an equally effective alternative, this means that
people who support gun control laws also support a public policy that we know
increases deaths and injuries. In Boulder, school officials have complained that
they cannot afford "airport-like" metal detectors. The Columbine gunmen started
shooting on their way into the school. How would a metal detector have made a
difference?

Gun-control supporters also parade a touching
faith in the therapeutic effect of counseling sessions, and classes on parenting
techniques, anger management, mutual respect and tolerance. The effectiveness of
such interventions is questionable. The murderers were apparently bright
teenagers who resisted authority, celebrated Adolph Hitler, and purposefully set
themselves apart by behaving unconventionally. People want to believe that
running these kinds of kids through a couple of canned touchy-feely group
sessions would have magically unkinked their twisted psyches. Such beliefs may
be emotionally satisfying. They are not reasonable.

For those whose emotional response to the
Columbine High murders is "never again," there is only one reasonable response.
Laws that disarm adults in schools make schools a safe zone for criminals. The
data overwhelmingly show that law-abiding citizens use guns responsibly. When
law-abiding citizens have guns, crime rates fall and mass murderers murder less.
Shooting back, or threatening to, saves lives. Thanks to gun-control advocates,
none of the teachers had that choice at Columbine High.

Dr. Linda Gorman is a Senior Fellow at the
Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden,
http://i2i.org.

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necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an
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comments to Independence Institute, 727 East 16th Ave., Denver, Colorado 80203 Phone 303-279-6536. (email)webmngr @ i2i.org